The Ghost Bride

Like all good literary heroines, Li Lan is motherless, impoverished, educated beyond the custom of the times, and uninterested in marriage, especially to someone who's dead.

Since she lives in 19th-century Malacca, the British colony in what is now Malaysia, this is a situation whose disadvantages Jane Austen herself would appreciate.

Author Yangsze Choo bases her first novel The Ghost Bride (3 stars out of four) on a little-known custom of Chinese immigrants to the Malay peninsula: marrying young women to recently deceased grooms, sometimes when romance is tragically cut short by death, sometimes to belatedly elevate a mistress to a wife.

Li Lan's potential match is for more complicated reasons, and her disembodied fiancé turns out to be especially importunate. Driven to a rash decision, Li Lan finds herself making a journey to the underworld to sort out her increasingly complex, and dangerous, romantic life.

Like the cultural stew of the Malayan peninsula Choo describes, the book folds in religious traditions from Muslim purdah to the Buddhist wheel of life. The Chinese underworld is apparently the Cook County of the afterlife, a flatland full of corrupt officials and scheming plutocrats, furnished entirely by offerings to the dead made by their survivors.

Like Persephone of Greek myth, Li Lan is told to eat nothing or she will never return to the living world. Her Virgil is a slightly shady coquette; her protector is part hard-boiled cop putting her in harm's way, and part Cary Grant, well-dressed and bantering flirtatiously.

There are ox-headed demons, puppet servants, attacking vultures and bribable Courts of Judgment. No wonder Li Lan thinks the proper Anglican cemeteries of the British colonials, with their "neat green swards and tidy gravestones under the frangipani trees,'' seem so restful.

Even as she describes rolling her eyes at her overprotective amah, her childhood nanny, or plowing through a platter of treats at a fancy mah-jongg party, Li Lan has a clear and amusing voice. She also proves to be resourceful, brave, passionate, and spirited enough to trade repartee with a dragon.

Choo's book is a bit overstuffed: from whodunit to ghost story to coming-of-age to romance, there is enough plot to fill several more novels.

But the beguiling tale of Li Lan navigating both the land of the dead and the territory of her own heart makes you hope Choo is the author who writes all of them.